 | Catapilla (1971)Genres: progressive rock, heavy progressive, jazz rock |
review by thomas
Put together a group with one guitarist, one bassist, one drummer, one vocalist, one woodwind player and two (!) saxophone players. Then play a heavy and jazzy sort of progressive rock with lots of intense, loud jamming and put out a record with only four songs…what do you get? You get Catapilla, that’s what you get.
This is a largely instrumental affair, thanks to the jamming in the two long songs – one of them, “Embryonic Fusion”, goes on for almost 25 minutes – and then add two shorter, more normal and accessible songs and you get the picture. Add to this a vocalist – one Anna Meek – that sings in a very unorthodox manner. She screams as much as she sings and she sings quite aggressively. I like this very much but many people seems to have a problem with this, don’t really know why ‘cause she has a very strong and good voice and can sing in a lighter, more relaxing way besides the aggressiveness that dominates; which she proves on the lighter “Tumbleweed”.
The saxophones are the main thing on this album together with some amazing jamming, so if you like your prog heavy, jazzy, quite unique and saxophone dominated this is for you. But those of you that don’t like jazzy prog that much need not to fear, I am not particularly into this myself, yet this album really grabs you. Maybe it’s the heaviness of the music that tones done the jazz thing a bit, maybe it isn’t that jazzy after all…the point is that this is a very good album regardless of what genre it should belong to foremost.
